Delta’s $250K MQD waiver rule. What will I do? What should you do?

Yesterday we learned that, as of January 1 2018, Delta has increased it’s MQD waiver requirement for Diamond Status to $250,000 in credit card spend. I promised an analysis. Here it is…

MQD Waiver Background

In order to earn top tier Diamond status, Delta SkyMiles members must meet the following requirements within each calendar year: Earn 125,000 MQMs (Medallion Qualifying Miles) or 140 MQSs (Medallion Qualifying Segments), and $15,000 MQDs (Medallion Qualifying Dollars).

MQMs and MQSs are typically earned by flying (although MQMs can be earned through credit card bonuses and spend as well). And MQDs are earned by spending money on Delta flights. An alternative to earning $15,000 MQDs is to get an MQD waiver. Until now, that has been relatively easy: spend $25,000 within a calendar year across one or more Delta branded cards, and the MQD requirement is waived.

It is that last part that is changing. Starting January 1 2018, $25,000 spend will still give you an MQD waiver that let’s you get Silver, Gold, or Platinum status, but you’ll need $250,000 spend to get a Diamond MQD waiver. Or you can do what Delta really wants you to do and spend $15,000 or more on Delta flights.

This change has absolutely no impact on those who strive for any elite status other than top tier Diamond status.

Diamond Winners, Losers, and Inbetweeners

Winners

Some groups of Diamond elites aren’t directly affected by the new rules. They win because the new rules should thin the Diamond herd a bit beginning in 2019. With fewer Diamond elites, the chances for upgrades should increase. And maybe, if they’re really lucky, Delta will unveil new and better Diamond perks.

Big Spending Frequent Flyers: If you already spend enough on Delta flights to earn the required $15,000 EQDs each year then you’re good to go.

Big Credit Card Spenders: Those who already spend over $250,000 per year on Delta credit cards won’t have to do anything different.

Foreign Mileage Runners: MQD requirements are only enforced for “U.S.-based Members”. If you’re not a U.S.-based Member, then you can fly those cheap long distance flights in order to earn the needed 125,000 MQMs, and you’ll be Diamond.

Losers

Several types of elites will be most hurt by these changes. Does it help them to know that Delta’s MQD waiver rules are better than United’s, and that AA doesn’t have a real waiver at all? Probably not.

Platinum+ Frequent Flyers: This is the group that flies more than enough to earn Platinum status, but not quite enough for Diamond. Through this year, they have used Delta credit card spend to get over the hump. They spent at least $25,000 in order to waive the Diamond MQD requirement, and they spent enough on their Delta Platinum and/or Delta Reserve cards to get the extra MQMs they needed. My guess is that a large percentage of Diamond elites fall into this bucket. This is the group that I expect to be most bitter about these changes.

Mileage Runners: If you previously earned Delta Diamond status primarily by flying cheap long distance flights, you’re probably out of luck for earning Diamond status going forward. One caveat is that it is possible to earn EQDs from certain partner airlines based on a percentage of the distance flown rather than the amount spent. So it is technically possible to reach diamond status from cheap flights, but it is probably impractical for most.

Rollover Elites: Several times in the past few years, my wife has been able to roll over enough MQMs from the prior year to get to Diamond status early in the current year. This was great because at times she needed new global upgrade certificates for mid-year travel. All we had to do was to make sure she spent $25,000 on Delta cards as quickly as possible, and she was good to go. This won’t work anymore. Those with huge stockpiles of MQMs that roll over from the previous year now won’t get top tier status until they meet the $250K spend MQD waiver or earn $15,000 MQDs (which do not roll-over from prior years).

“2 Player Game” Credit Card Mileage Runners: In previous posts (such as this one) I’ve described how it’s possible for two people to work together to keep both at Diamond status through credit card spend. While there are many ways to make this happen, most rely on one “player” gifting MQMs earned with their Delta Reserve card to the other every other year. When played this way, neither person spends anywhere near $250,000 on Delta credit cards. So, going forward, this simply won’t work to get to Diamond status.

Inbetweeners

Those who are regularly close to meeting the new requirements will have to make a tough decision. Do they do whatever is needed to get to Diamond or stay with Platinum? I think there are at least two groups of inbetweeners:

Almost There Frequent Flyers: This group is similar to the Platinum+ group, but is even closer to achieving Diamond status through flying. To get to Diamond starting next year, this group would have to opt for a few extra Delta flights each year, or purposely buy some higher price tickets than they would normally do.

~$200K Spenders: This group already puts a tremendous amount of spend on their Delta credit cards. As shown below, people who maxed out credit card spending opportunities for MQMs were already spending $220K per year. Now the question will be whether to spend even more…

While 100,000 MQMs isn’t in itself enough to earn Diamond status, it does get you 80% of the way there. And you don’t even have to bridge the gap by flying. It’s possible to roll over extra MQMs from the previous year or to receive MQMs gifted from another Delta Reserve cardholder (MQMs earned from Reserve card spend are giftable; those earned from Delta Platinum card spend are not).

For the rare few of us that max out our MQM earnings through spend each year, the new MQD requirement isn’t that big of a deal. We already spend $220,000 across our Delta cards. Beginning in 2018, we’ll have to spend $30K more in order to keep Diamond status. If we don’t do the extra spend then we get Platinum status (which requires 75K annual MQMs) and the extra MQMs will roll over to the next year. In some circumstances that may be preferred.

Platinum vs. Diamond, What’s the Difference?

Both levels of status offer my favorite feature: free award changes and cancellations. This feature alone makes our miles much more valuable. When we see a great available award we can snag it even if we don’t know for sure whether we’ll fly it. We did this recently when we booked saver level awards on the new Delta One Suite (see: How to book Delta One Suite saver awards). We booked two separate flights because we don’t yet know which we’ll fly. We’ll cancel the other when plans firm up. We’ve also used this perk to get multiple saver seats on a single flight. One time, for example, we wanted to fly three to London in business class, but only two saver level seats were available. So, I booked two seats and checked back later for another to open. A day or two later, another seat did open. If it wasn’t for the ability to cancel the award, I wouldn’t have risked initially booking just two.

Another great feature that both status levels share is the ability to choose four regional upgrade certificates as a Choice Benefit when reaching Platinum status. These certificates sometimes let you upgrade at the time of booking to first class on domestic flights. More often, you get wait-listed for an upgrade, but that’s OK too. It has the effect of bumping you to the top of the upgrade list.

4 Global Upgrade Certificates. Love these — especially the global ones. Consider all of the cheap flights we’ve seen recently to Europe (often around $400). You could buy dirt-cheap economy tickets, but still fly in lie-flat business class by applying these certificates. Often you have to wait-list for the upgrade, but we’ve had 100% success in clearing the upgrades so far. Caution: upgrades can be much less likely on certain routes.

Delta Sky Club Guest Pass (Credit Card Access). Many of us already get access to Delta SkyClubs when flying Delta thanks to having either Delta Reserve or non-Delta Amex Platinum cards. This new benefit will let us bring in guests while only cashing in one Choice Benefit.

Gift Gold status. To achieve Gold status, some people go to great lengths with end of year mileage runs, or they pay Delta outrageous prices for end of year MQMs (Medallion Qualifying Miles). This is a great alternative.

25000 Bonus Miles. This isn’t an exciting option, but if you have no one to gift Gold status to, it’s still pretty valuable.

What will I do?

I’m a $220K Spend Inbetweener. To earn Diamond status in 2018 for the 2019 elite year, I’ll have to spend $30,000 more than I would have otherwise. Since that extra spend won’t help to earn bonus miles or MQMs, it will drag down the overall value per dollar of my Delta spend.

Currently, $220,000 of spend results in earning 320,000 redeemable SkyMiles and 100,000 MQMs. If we value SkyMiles at a penny each and MQMs at 3 cents each, then we are getting $3,200 + $3,000 = $6,200 value from that spend. That amounts to a 2.8% return on spend. Not bad at all.

If we throw in another $30K of spend though, we’ll earn 350,000 redeemable miles and the same 100,000 MQMs. At the same valuations, that comes to $3,500 + $3,000 = $6,500 in value for $250,000 in spend. That amounts to a 2.6% rate of return. That’s still not bad but it drops slightly below the rate we can earn instead with the BankAmericard Travel Rewards Card or the BankAmericard Premium Rewards Card. And with those cards we are not limited to spending our rewards on Delta.

My wife is in the same situation. We’ve been using manufactured spending techniques to spend $220K annually on her Delta cards too. The difference is that she regularly flies to Europe for work and she’s required to book economy. The Global upgrade certificates are extremely valuable to her because they provide a way for her to fly in lie-flat luxury. So, for my wife, the extra spend makes sense. We’ll do it.

Back to me… My wife’s four global upgrade certificates make it possible for her to upgrade two round trip flights per year. That’s not enough. If I get Diamond status again, I could join her on one of her trips (I often do anyway) and use my four certificates to upgrade both of us both ways. Is it worth all that for one trip? Probably not.

The reasonable thing for me to do would be to cut my Delta spend in half to $110K. With roll-over MQMs and actual flying, that will still be enough to keep Platinum status. And as I said before, Platinum status already offers two of my favorite elite perks: free award changes, and regional upgrade certificates.

So, that’s settled. I now know the logical thing to do. The question is whether I’ll do the logical thing. Airlines count on people making irrational decisions for the perceived glow of elite status and miles. Will I be swayed by the Diamond allure? Maybe I will. Honestly I won’t know for sure until I’m forced to make the decision next year.

Greg is the owner, founder, and primary author of the Frequent Miler. He earns millions of points and miles each year, mostly without flying, and dedicates this blog to teaching others how to do the same.

That’s a great question. I took the lazy way out and used an MQM valuation that I developed years ago that was based on the cost of acquiring elite qualifying miles rather than the value you get from them.

I think this question deserves an entire post… or several. Determining the value you get from elite status is hard and determining value from MQMs is even harder in many situations. Take for example the person who is maybe 1000 MQMs away from the next level of status. If that next level is valuable to them, then they would be willing to pay much more for those last 1000 MQMs than they would have otherwise.

With a similar thought in mind, let’s assume that getting to Platinum status is worth doing. Then we can simplify the question to: what are the incremental Diamond benefits worth? And we can divide by the 50K MQMs required to get from Platinum to Diamond in order to estimate the value of those MQMs.

So, off the top of my head, here’s how much each Diamond-only benefit is worth to me:

4 Global Upgrades: Let’s say $500 each = $2,000 (this is based on the question: if I bought an international economy ticket, would I pay $500 to upgrade one-way? Answer: yes)

Then, to make things simple, let’s say I take 25,000 miles for Choice benefits 2 and 3. That’s 50,000 miles worth at least $500.

If someone valued the global upgrades at only $250 each + $500 in bonus Skymiles, they would get an MQM value of 3 cents per MQM

This was very helpful in pushing me towards going for Diamond again!

The harder question is how much MQMs are worth to get to Platinum status. The Platinum benefits that I value are much harder to measure. For example, how do you come up with a dollar amount for the ability to freely change and cancel award tickets?

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10 months ago

Guest

king king

What about the fees for 8 cards? dont u pay around 2000 $ to get start the MS challenge of 250k $ spend ?

So let me understand here. You are going to MS $250,000 on Amex for your wife’s Diamond status, then you are going to MS $110,000 on Amex for your Plat status? $360,000 total for the year or $30k /month. Geez…. how much would you say you MS in a given year?

There must be some really low hanging fruit out there or your spending a good chunk of your time/day to MS?

Over time I’ve ms-ed more and more each year through many different techniques. At this point, these numbers aren’t at all hard for me to achieve. I’m not suggesting that others should do the same though! Always start slow and ramp up only if you’re comfortable with it.

[…] to trade messages with those on the ground. I guess they are projecting enough revenue from people spending $250,000 a year on Delta credit cards going to cover messaging access for the rest of us (Thanks, Greg! :-). Note that you will not be […]

Actually how were people even spending $25k a year??? Real expenses? or one can actually MS that much a year?

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10 months ago

Guest

Chris

Some people have MSed over $1 million in a year, though this was before banks started cracking down more on it. Personally I’d be terrified of getting hit with money laundering charges by the Feds if I was anywhere near that.

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10 months ago

Guest

Mser

Greg, lots of rationalizations needed to assume you get sufficient value to overcome the added fees and lost opportunity costs. Just the AFs alone are nearly $1300. Putting $220K with few spend bonuses ($120K is 1.5x on Reserve). So for $220K spend, you get 280K Skypesos. Then you’ve wasted valuable CC slots on Amex cards that prevent more lucrative opportunities (can be worth many hundreds or thousands depending on products). Then there’s the cost to MS – typically in the 0.4cpp range, so you spend another $880 in fees. The GUCerts aren’t “worth” $500 each. And what self-respecting hacker is buying economy tickets??? You are supposed to fly “free”, right? So why are you buying ANY tickets and upgrading using GUCs?? What you claim is $2000 value needs to be offset by the cost of the econ tickets. It’s barely a wash in my book.

SO earns Diamond thru biz flights, but despite being Diamond, we’ve literally never flown Delta for personal travel in last 5 years – always been better routings or product alternatives (inability to fly F on Delta, let alone partners is such a fail, it’s contemptible). She has >1M Skypesos and only uses for family with Delta’s obscene award costs (otherwise she’d never use any). She used to be 1K on United and it’s a night and day difference in the usefulness of her award miles (we used her UA miles regularly – almost all on international partners in F). Skypesos are barely worth 1cpp, the least valuable of all airline award currencies ime.

Methinks you are massively deluding yourself as to the real value you are getting.

It sounds like you are in a very different situation than me. I wouldn’t do this in your shoes either. In my case, we fly out of a Delta hub and we highly value non-stop flights (or at least minimizing connections). Delta is almost always our best bet. So, with or without high level status, we will continue to fly mostly Delta as long as we live here. And, given that we would be flying Delta anyway, we’ve often gotten great value from Delta miles, Delta upgrades, and even the credit card companion tickets.

I don’t really see how you can say the GUCerts are not worth $500 each. It depends on many factors — most importantly the route’s normal pricing and how important it is for the person to be in business class.

Those factors could make a GUCert be worth as much as $1,500 or more. In Greg’s case, he says Europe is their common international destination and overall, Europe is more expensive for business class than Asian routes (and others). I’ve commonly seen $8-$10K business class tickets for Delta’s UK route from the west coast (PDX).

However, I do agree that $250K is a lot of card spend on any Delta AMEX and the AMEX Platinum (Personal and Business)/ AMEX Blue Business Plus duo/trio with membership reward points converted to Skymiles or used on AMEX Travel with the 35% airline bonus..

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8 months ago

Guest

Ray

I agree with this and have discussed this with a few others, you can cut some of the AF costs but there is still the cost and time of the MS that isn’t even in the calculations. Not to mention the opportunity cost of using up Amex slots.

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10 months ago

Guest

Genise

I am at 119,000 MQM and have about 40k MQM left in flying this year. I want to have the max of rollover MQM into next year and actually want the remainder of my DL flights credited to another airline.
What would be the best airline to do so ?
Thanks !

It really depends on fare class. I always use wheretocredit.com to determine what the payouts should be (but then don’t forget to double check on the airline website). I’ve credited paid Skyteam flights to Flying Blue (Air France / KLM) in order to have some mileage-earning flight activity there (there have been sporadic reports over the years of account shut downs and/or being forced to go to an airport to ticket in person if you just open a Flying Blue account and immediately transfer in points and book an award ticket, so I think it helps to season the account with some flight activity). I also think Flying Blue miles are great since they are transfer partners with everyone, so I know I could put together the miles for a ticket any day of the week even if one or two of my balances are low. Of course, on the other hand, you might think that since you’ve got a bajillion points that can already transfer to Flying Blue, you’d rather credit to a program that has fewer transfer partners. I could see both sides, but Flying Blue would probably be my pick.

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10 months ago

Guest

Genise

Have already a FB account with enuf miles in it. And usually their award tix in EU are high-priced, high-taxed.
How about Alaska – or is this a NO NO since their ugly divorce ?

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10 months ago

Guest

VM

Another thing to consider is that by having all four delta cards, you can only have one more CC from Amex among a lot of good cards like OBC, SCP, SPG, BBP

When this was all rumored a couple of months ago I decided that I would like to see what things are like in 2019 after the herd had been thinned. I booked a China Eastern Business Class flight from New York to SIngapore…almost 20,000 miles. I booked it through Amex Travel for $2300 and used MR points with my 50% back. I will credit the flight to Delta. If I am reading the rules right this flight earns MQDs as a percentage of the miles flown which will be about 7,000 MQD. That will leave me only needing about $8,000 MQD to earn during the rest of the year which I will do.

So why not focus on earning MR or Chase points and use them to pay for a ticket with one of Delta’s Tier 1 partners?

I have been a Diamond Medallion since the beginning but I have grown disenchanted. Perhaps things will be better in 2019 with less Diamonds. If not I think I will just give up.

Wow, that’s really tough! The only options I can think of are:
1. Book and fly Delta. Even the shortest cheapest trip should do it.
2. Make sure to complete $25K spend before 12/31 across any Delta credit cards you have in order to earn an MQD waiver

[…] cards more worthwhile since they offer the opportunity to spend towards elite status (See: Delta’s $250K MQD waiver rule. What will I do? What should you do? for more on spending toward Delta status) — and the current offers on both of the Platinum […]

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5 months ago

Guest

TMouse

Greg, I just read your old posts on how to manufacture spend Delta elite status. As they are from 2014 and a bit difficult to read as many of the words are crossed-out, Perhaps at some point you could do a newer post on how to do this. Very interested!

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